"We have active work going on in 3 categories of projects, all of which we’ve never quite done before" - PH3's Durante chats with us about what to expect next, Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure for PS5 and Switch 2, the industry, and more

RPG Site: Before getting to the new ports, how have you been and how has 2026 been for PH3 so far after Proud Nordics?

Peter 'Durante' Thoman: We’ve been doing a lot of new things that I can hopefully talk about soon-ish, but not right at this moment. They carry quite a bit more risk than the porting work we’ve mostly focused on so far, so I’m a bit worried but also excited to see how it will turn out.

RPG Site: With Zero and Azure, you previously worked on the PC and Switch 1 versions. Were you always planning on adding the new texture options before the new ports were being planned?

Durante: We’ve wanted to do this for quite some time, but we didn’t really have the budget to implement new features on the existing versions any more – as you know, we’ve already included quite a lot! So the new ports gave us an opportunity to tie up that loose end and deliver basically the only somewhat widely requested set of features (texture and filtering selection) that we hadn’t implemented yet.

RPG Site: With the patches for PC and Switch 1, will all versions be at feature parity, not counting the performance or visual differences?

Durante: Yes, absolutely, that is our goal.

RPG Site: Are there any other new features you worked on for these ports?

Durante: I think the only other substantial feature – other than the porting work itself of course – is mouse input support on Switch 2.

RPG Site: Did any of the work done on PS5 and Switch 2 end up improving the PC/Switch 1 versions through the update aside from the new textures option?

Durante: This happened quite a few times on previous projects we worked on, but I can’t really think of anything in particular in this case. I’d like to take that as a sign that our previous PC / Switch 1 versions were already very solid.

RPG Site: Can you discuss the porting process for Switch 2 and adding three handheld options and two docked options for different graphics modes. Was it challenging despite the game's age?

Durante: Given that we started from our PC version, which is already extremely flexible in terms of options, it wasn’t too challenging. There are a few things that came up which we had to figure out, since we tried to basically do everything the platform allows us to do. For example, we tried to do VRR in docked mode, but that simply isn’t a thing.

One funny anecdote that came up is that Markus, who worked on Switch 2 for the most part, discovered a bug in his LG OLED TV firmware. He was testing the docked 1440p 120 Hz mode, and didn’t get any image. At first he thought we were doing something wrong (a natural first assumption in cases like that), but it turns out that was actually a known bug on his particular TV model and after upgrading the firmware it worked just fine.

RPG Site: Did you consider doing a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition cross gen release with an upgrade path or is that something NIS America decided on before?

Durante: As always when you ask about package/bundling/pricing/etc. decisions, I have to say that in all those regards, we simply implement what the publisher tasks us with doing.

RPG Site: How was it working with mouse controls and did you consider doing touchscreen support to simulate the mouse as well?

Durante: Mouse controls weren’t too difficult to implement. Of course you need to do rather mundane things like actually drawing a cursor (on Windows that just happens at the OS level), but mapping the actual inputs is quite straightforward. I think touch would be less suitable, and if you have the system in your hands anyway I’d argue that it makes sense to use the ergonomic physical controls that already exist.

RPG Site: Moving over to PS5, are the games already 4K120fps on it? Did you do any PS5 Pro enhancements? Maybe 8K downsampled?

Durante: This might be the longest answer in the entire interview. The short of it is yes, on PS5 (and Pro) both games are 4k 120 FPS, and they run consistently at that performance level.

Now, you might think that this should be self-evident and not take much effort, given that these were games originally on PSP. Sure, that was at 30 FPS, and lower quality, and we added things like unlimited draw distance, but still, a PS5 is several orders of magnitude more powerful.

However, it wasn’t actually that trivial. In fact, looking at each individual part of this porting project, getting a completely consistent 120 FPS out of these ports on PS5 is the single aspect that consumed most development time. When we started testing higher framerates on the platform, we quickly discovered that some scenarios didn’t reach a consistent 120 FPS, sometimes even dropping into the 70s. Realistically, we could probably leave it at that without anyone really complaining, since it’s a turn-based game and I doubt Digital Foundry will do a deep dive on this port. But of course, we couldn’t leave it at that and live with ourselves. So we ended up spending literally several man-weeks on this, because it turned out to be really hard to find the reason.

We knew from the start that it had to be something very silly, but unlike most performance issues, going through various profilers didn’t actually help and might have confused the issue. Because the problem manifested as a “bubble” forming in GPU processing (meaning that the GPU seemingly just didn’t do anything for a large part of each frame), which is normally something one would associate with either some sort of synchronization happening, or a CPU limitation. And so we investigated both of these possibilities in depth, but ultimately it turned out to be more insidious.

As you might imagine, for games as old as this, a lot of legacy code is involved. We eventually discovered that some of that code didn’t fully initialize some structures in memory, which meant that some parts of them were unset, which in turn resulted in basically random information being stored in that part of the memory. This subsequently led to draw calls involving those structures contributing to the GPU bubble we were seeing (and that caused the performance issue).

What made it so hard to find is that, in every profiler and tool we had access to, there was actually no way to associate the inflation of that bubble with any specific draw calls – it showed up independently of those, accumulated at the frame boundary. After resolving the root cause of that issue, and with all the intermediate optimizations that we tried along the way, the game is now rock solid at 120 FPS, and could actually run well in excess of 200 basically everywhere.

That might have been way more information than anyone wanted, but it was by far the most interesting aspect of the whole port.

RPG Site: What are your thoughts on Sony's new enhanced PSSR?

Durante: I think it’s good that they – and also AMD on PC – are finally, for the most part, catching up in ML-based image reconstruction. Even with DLSS3 it was already obvious that the cost/quality ratio of it simply massively outperforms any purely analytical techniques, and after DLSS4 it got increasingly silly to watch people pretend that e.g. FSR3 or old PSSR were even remotely in the same quality category as DLSS, when starting from the same number of actually shaded pixels.

RPG Site: One aspect not advertised is the save transfer. I was happy to see it for both Switch 1->2 and PS4->PS5. How much work goes into a feature like this?

Durante: More than you would probably expect. On the console platforms it (understandably) requires some scaffolding to access data from another game, and then all different directions and categories (i.e. normal saves and clear saves) also need to be well-tested.

One particular special case that required handling is “diagonal” save import - specifically if someone had completed Zero on Switch 1 and then wanted to load that clear save into Azure on Switch 2 to continue from there. This was not trivial, because the abstractions that already existed never accounted for such a case, and so had to be extended to not just differentiate between normal saves and clear saves, but also to differentiate between clear saves from Switch 1 and those from Switch 2.

RPG Site: Is there any plan to bring the custom save interface into the PS5 version so you don't rely on Sony's default UI?

Durante: No, that was intentionally left at the default UI for the platform.

RPG Site: Was there any consideration for doing cross platform saves like say Steam to Switch 1/2 through Steam Cloud? I know some games have issues on PS4/5 with this, but Steam and Switch 1/2 seem pretty common these days for cross save.

Durante: I personally would like that, but it introduces some complexity and upkeep, and that wasn’t considered in scope for this release.

RPG Site: Given hardware prices going up and everything getting more expensive, what are your thoughts on the state of console gaming right now?

Durante: In my personal opinion, platform holders could simply delay the release of new systems by several years, and gaming as a whole wouldn’t really be affected.

Traditionally, there are two reasons to release a new system: first, to overcome hardware limitations. But I don’t actually believe there are any meaningful limitations on realizing almost all gameplay ideas on e.g. PS5, and people who want the best graphical fidelity (on console) can resort to buying the pro versions.

The second traditional reason is to basically give game sales a launch window push. However, I think that is mostly a thing of the past anyway, with backwards compatibility and cross-generational games filling out the potential library much more at the start. It’s not like the 90s or even 00s where, if you get a console at launch, you basically have the choice of a handful of games to buy to actually have something to play on it.

So I don’t see a good reason to release new consoles in the current situation. But I doubt that will stop platform holders. Sony could e.g. be incentivized to phase out physical media more quickly, and Microsoft as the clear “loser” of the current generation always has some incentive for a new start – even if, as I said above, I think that new console generations are far from the clean break they once were.

RPG Site: What about PC handhelds and the new Android-based ones?

Durante: As you know, I love PC handhelds, and in particular the Steam Deck. In terms of single player gaming time I’m pretty sure more than 80% of mine is now on the Deck. So I’m pretty bummed that right as these devices were picking up more steam, the overall market conditions changed like that and put them out of reach for many. Still, as someone who has been doing the whole gaming thing for longer than some readers of this are likely to have been alive, I think of it as a temporary setback. Eventually, the hardware market will normalize, and until then there are more than enough games to play that run on a proverbial potato.

As for Android, I’m personally not really into the vast majority of games offered in the phone ecosystems, but I am interested in seeing where Linux compatibility goes with those devices.

RPG Site: What are your thoughts on GameNative and the possibility of Proton on ARM?

Durante: Regarding GameNative, this is more of an enthusiast complaint, but with the layering approaches on Android I’m always wary of input lag. I think the potential of running PC games directly on Linux on ARM devices – especially relatively low-cost ARM devices for thousands of quality indie PC games – is a lot more exciting in the medium to long term. But I haven’t personally had an opportunity or need to try it out yet.

RPG Site: Since you primarily play on PC, what are your thoughts on Sony ditching discs in 2028?

Durante: To provide some background on my perspective, I haven’t actually played games on consoles (other than for testing) in at least 6 years now, so I’m not going to be personally affected either way. That said, it has always been my belief that physical releases are much more important in the console ecosystems than on PC, simply because of the latter’s much more open and compatible overall nature.

On PC, you can actually own digital games, for a reasonable definition of “own”. Obviously that is the case on GoG, but even for thousands of DRM-free Steam games (like all our releases) you can just copy them anywhere and play them forever, on any current and future hardware; you can find your saves easily on your system, back them up however you want to, and add any arbitrary compatibility layers or mods to make these games work, likely even on your mystery supercomputer from 2064.

None of that is the case for your digital console games, which are heavily encrypted in increasingly sophisticated, hardware-assisted, and hard to break ways.

So I think from any enthusiast perspective on the medium, anything released in purely digital form and exclusively on a console would be a disaster in terms of preservation.

RPG Site: The Steam Machine is now available alongside the Steam Controller. I love the controller, but haven't gotten my Steam Machine yet. I hope to soon. What do you think of the machine and its value?

Durante: I don’t have and don’t plan to get a Steam machine, since I obviously have a pretty good desktop PC and a Steam Deck for portable gaming. That said, I think the value perspective is more nuanced than a lot of discussion online would make it appear – though honestly that’s true of basically everything. Anyway, I think, relative to current hardware prices in general, it’s not actually bad value. Yes, you can build your own full-size - and maybe even small-form-factor, if you shop around - PC for a slightly lower price, but that doesn’t really give you the same level of integration. And much more importantly, it’s not a seamless “unbox, plug in, play” experience, which I think is where much of the appeal for that particular audience comes from.

That said, of course it is more expensive than it really should be, and if you had told me that price a year ago I’d have thought it ludicrous, but that’s more of a function of the current market overall – and as I said above, I expect that to resolve itself sooner or (probably) later.

RPG Site: How do you find the Steam Controller?

Durante: I assume you mean the Steam Controller (2026), as opposed to the Steam Controller (2015). As a huge fan of the latter, I think the new one is a bit of a mixed bag. I do expect that most people will find it much more appealing, but it’s just a much “safer” design overall, and, in my opinion, more compromised as a result. Obviously, its buttons, sticks, back buttons, and especially shoulder buttons are much better than the first iteration. But there are two aspects in which it is a step back, from my perspective: ergonomics and the positioning/shape of the right trackpad.

I believe that the trackpad is simply the superior input device for any game in which you control a camera – superior to a stick of course, not a mouse. And on the old Steam controller, the round right trackpad was in the most prominent and easy-to-reach position, while on the new one it is “demoted” to a more out-of-the-way spot, just to give prime real estate to a right stick that, in the vast majority of games, is used for camera control and is much worse at that than the touchpad in trackball mode.

I expect that to already be a rare opinion, but probably even fewer people agree on the ergonomics side of things. The new Steam controller is held exactly like an Xbox, or Playstation, or modern Nintendo, or basically every other third party controller. Which is why people like it. The old Steam controller was actually shaped to be held differently: rather than holding it in your hands you hold it nestled in between your hands. That actually provides far better access to more of the control surface, at least for my hand size, and also makes it much easier to hold in a way that allows you to access all the shoulder and back controls without moving any of your fingers. Of course, the fact that you have to hold it differently from any other common controller had an impact on the learning curve and overall acceptance, so I can absolutely understand why Valve was more conservative with the new model’s shape. But I still want a controller shaped like the 2015 model with all the new buttons, physical D-pad and features of the new one.

Note that all of that is in comparison to the old Steam Controller, for those use cases I found that particularly good for. I do think that as an overall PC controller the new Steam Controller is quite easily the best and most versatile input device around. Especially in terms of versatility there’s no comparison – to me, the old Steam Controller was basically unusable for anything that needs a D-pad as a primary input, for example, so I always switched between different controllers based on the genre. Conversely, the new Steam Controller is great at almost everything.

RPG Site: I'm kind of annoyed at Valve for verifying a lot of games that frankly run very poorly on Steam Deck while leaving many that work perfectly and run wonderfully, as Playable or Unsupported for dumb reasons. One example is We Love Katamari Reroll was marked as Playable but not Verified because it supported 800p, but didn't set it by default and defaulted to 720p. You had an issue with save transfer affecting Steam Deck Verification right? What do you think of the Verification system for Steam Machine and Deck right now?

Durante: I do understand that the results won’t always match what enthusiasts expect in terms of performance, but even so, I agree that there should be a higher standard. Similarly, I think some decisions and criteria are just silly. For example, a game could have no 16:10 support at all, and be fully verified, but at the same time you have cases like Katamari Reroll that you pointed out. Or our case where we had games that worked (and performed) perfectly, with full out of the box 16:10 support and Steam Deck detection, but had to implement a niche feature with a wild workaround to get fully verified – even though Steam doesn’t even offer a supported API to do what we needed to do. I also recently played a “verified” game that had videos which wouldn’t work at all, with the first one showing up just ~30 minutes into it. Of course that was easy to get working with GE-Proton, but this is not something that can be expected from the average user, and games like that simply shouldn’t be verified.

I understand why Valve, in all of Steam, always aims to make things as easy for developers and publishers as possible – and that there are people out there just waiting for a chance to jump at their throats whenever they don’t do that – but at the same time I think they really should be stricter about some things. Verification is one of them, and another one would be simply not allowing new games to lack support for Steam Cloud saves. Maybe provide the option to opt out in truly exceptional cases with a good fully explained excuse, but that should be exceedingly rare and manually approved.

RPG Site: Back in 2024, I mentioned how I hope you would do a Crossbell double pack for PS5. It finally happened. It is now time for me to bring up my regular request where I hope you work on Switch 2 versions of Ys VIII and Ys IX. Any comments on that?

Durante: The same comment as always: tell it to the appropriate publisher(s), we can’t unilaterally make anyone give us any particular project. We’d certainly be up for it.

RPG Site: Have you had a chance to try out the Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter PC port with its recent update adding more upscaling options or the Kyoto Xanadu one? I'm curious what you think of the implementation.

Durante:I usually don’t play remasters or remakes of games that I’ve already played, simply because I’d rather play something new from the ever-increasing list of games I’d like to try but haven't gotten to yet. So I might never actually play Sky 1st, while Kyoto Xanadu is in the latter category.

RPG Site: What's your take on local co-op in PC games recently and do you plan on bringing it to Proud Nordics or any of your console ports if possible? I think the Switch 2 joy-cons would be a good local multiplayer setup when feasible for some of your older ports.

Durante: I enjoy that co-op seems on the rise in general, but at the same time my favourite games to play in co-op are long, campaign-based games with a clearly defined end, which doesn’t seem to be the focus lately. Most effort in developing co-op games seems to go into either open-ended software-as-a-service projects, or more casual “party” titles. Not that anything is wrong with either of these, but what I am personally really interested in is playing full, more traditional single-player experiences, together.

As for bringing co-op to Proud Nordics, it was always only a hobby project I did in my free time, and I just couldn’t justify porting it over for a relatively minor amount of new content. Obviously, if any publisher actually wanted to do it, or bring it to other platforms, I’d be more than happy to.

RPG Site: Did you watch the recent Nintendo Direct where we had an official port of Touhou 6 announced? What are your thoughts on Touhou right now and did you play Fantasy Maiden Wars?

Durante: I did not watch it live, but I have seen it, as well as Zun’s related video message. As a long-time, physical-release-owning, Touhou fan I’m thrilled that the most influential of the official games (I expect there to be more) can be experienced by a larger audience.

As for Fantasy Maiden Wars, I haven’t played it yet, but it is quite high up on my list. What I have played relatively recently is Touhou Artificial Dreams in Arcadia, which I absolutely loved. It seems like a game made for me personally, with it being at the intersection of first-person party-based RPGs (“blobbers” as some of us nerds call them) and Touhou, and it’s extremely well-executed too.

RPG Site: What should we expect in the rest of 2026 and early 2027 from PH3?

Durante: Completely new things.

I can’t get into the details – well, for some of them I absolutely could, but don’t want to, yet – but we have active work going on in 3 categories of projects, all of which we’ve never quite done before. One of those categories is quite close to what we’re known for, but still different in practice; one of them is substantially different but at least still the same overall concept; and one of them is just way out there. You’ll almost certainly see the first one in 2026, and probably very soon. And something would have to go horribly wrong with the second and third if they were to fail to show up in 2027 in at least some capacity.

RPG Site: What are you looking forward to playing this year?

Durante: I wanted to say Lords of the Fallen II – I’m always one for competent co-op Soulslikes – but I just looked it up to verify and apparently that slipped into 2027. While I assume the question was more about new releases, I’ll just mention an already released game that I look forward to getting into this year: Citizen Sleeper 2. I greatly enjoyed the first one and from all I hear the sequel is even better.

RPG Site: What is your favorite game of 2026 so far?

Durante:Even though I mostly play games a while after they were released, looking through my recent Steam history I actually spotted two games from this year that I at least want to mention. Neither is perfect, but they are very enjoyable in their respective niche and genre. The first is Esoteric Ebb. This one wears its inspiration on its sleeve, and does try a bit too hard with it at times in my opinion, but it’s not like we are drowning in a sea of Discolikes, and its setting was sufficiently unique to draw me in. The second is Kotama and Academy Citadel. Arguably, Metroidvania is a genre we’re drowning in, but it’s also probably my most-played single-player genre, and Kotama was honestly better than I thought it would be. At its higher difficulty mode it has some of the most interesting boss fights of the entire genre, which I really didn’t expect going in.

But if you ask me which game, regardless of release year, I enjoyed most by far in 2026 so far, the answer would clearly be Expedition 33. I played it this year – in co-op with the co-op mod – and even now, 4 months after completing it and well after the honeymoon phase, I think it’s easily in the top 10 of all JRPGs I’ve ever played. Maybe even top 5, and it’s a long list. It does so many different things, including presentation (in terms of visuals and music), story, characters and dialogue (especially for the genre), interesting character building/equipment systems and choices therein, sidequests, variety and pacing, and combat so well that it’s almost hard to believe that it’s a studio’s first-time effort.

RPG Site: When we spoke last for Trails Beyond the Horizon and Proud Nordics, you shared a photo of new tea you bought from the Renegade Tea Estate. How has that been going and did you discover any new tea since? How many PH3 ports do I need to buy before you drink a double espresso?

Durante: I actually just had a cup of one of those teas before this interview! I like all of them, though their black teas, at least the ones I tried, are not exactly the kind that is my absolute favorite. That said, and to answer your second question, a friend recently gave me some Wakōcha Benifūki, and that is fantastic and exactly to my taste in black tea.

As for the double espresso, well, first of all, buying any of the ports we worked on doesn’t really do anything for us directly. But even if that situation were to change (here the medium’s limitations are apparent – imagine me winking and gesticulating wildly at an earlier question), I doubt you could buy enough for me to assault my taste buds like that.